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vCloud Air is now proudly hosting my favourite Nostalgia VM having recently decided to extend my Homelab into the cloud by installing an on premise vCloud Connector Server and a vCloud Connector Node. The entire setup process took literally no more than 20minutes and the beauty of the Nostalgia VM was that as its virtual disk is so small, even on a consumer ISP, the copy speed to transfer from the vCenter UI (note this is only accessible via the C# client) took barely any time.

Register the vCloud Connector Server with the on-premise node and the publically available vCloud Air node via the IP address of the datacentre assigned to you as part of your subscription (found here), along with your credentials (note that the name you define for your VDC is the ID visible within vCloud Director from within vCloud Air and not the display name of your VDC)

I then enabled the vCloud connector plugin from within the vSphere client and could now see both my private and cloud based VMs within the plugin.

If you haven’t already created a catalog within your VDC, you need to do this before you can copy a VM but this is a three click process within vCloud Director.

Copying VMs to vCloud Air also requires the source VM to be switched off.

After the the copy completed, I powered up the VM and opened up the web embedded console. Even though I’d only recently reacquainted myself with the original game through the VMRC on my vSan setup, playing it whilst running from the public cloud gave it a whole new dimension in playing Prince of Persia online! Admittedly my timings and responsiveness had to be slightly adjusted for keyboard inputs due to the larger than 1ms latency I get from my homelab to the VM, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was still playable in its full glory.

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In late 2014, VMware changed their default stance on the use of TPS to share memory between Virtual Machines as a consequence of a low risk security threat. Given that VMware needed to remain squeaky clean on security compliance, they duly changed the out of the box way TPS worked forever which for some customers meant that memory budgets and allocations that were architected based upon the old implementation needed to be reconsidered. Views on whether you should or shouldn’t change the default behaviour of VMware to revert back to what is an extremely efficient way of sharing memory are discussions that need to be had with corporate security officers but for homelabs, where YOU wear the security hat (amongst many others), why not benefit from reclaiming some much needed RAM.

Reasons to consider whether or not to do this can be found on numerous other blog posts, but as a quick and dirty guide, here are the steps you need to follow to restore the original mechanism:

On each host within your cluster, through the Web Client, click on Manage –> Settings –> Advanced System Settings. Locate Mem.ShareForceSalting and change the default value of 2 to 0 (zero)

vMotion the workloads off or power them off and on again for the change to take effect!

To demonstrate the benefits of reverting TPS to the legacy way, on my 3 node VSAN cluster with 48GB of RAM, here are the memory stats before and after:

HOST1:

HOST2:

HOST3:

As you can see from the PSHARE/MB common: saving column, in total across all three hosts, with a little bit of maths, this is a memory reclamation of over 10GB which is just short of a quarter of the RAM available to my entire Cluster. Why not try it and see what effect it has, at least on your homelab!

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I was trying to get AutoDeploy to work in a Nested ESXi configuration whereby I configured stateless caching, but each time I would end up with less and less hair as the Host Profile just would NOT apply and I’d see “Host does not appear to have a compliant stateless cache”.

It always came down to the application of the “System Image Cache Configuration” that would result in the Profile failing to commit. Frustrating as it seemed, I was almost at the point of giving up, until I tried exhaustively hunting through the log files:

/var/log/syslog.log which always returned: “filesystem was created but mount failed on device “mpx.vmhba1:C0:T0:L0:6″.: Not found”

I Googled the status 1048320 and as if by magic, the article below was returned from William Lam from back in 2013 which effectively states that whilst vSAN does not make use of SCSI-2 reservations the LVM driver still requires it in order to create a VMFS datastore. By entering the following command on the ESXi hosts presenting vSAN (yes – the physical hosts, not the Nested VMs), this fakes the required SCSI reservations needed to proceed:-

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I’ve been seeing some strange behaviour whilst performing some deployment operations such as pushing out OVF templates in that occasionally I would see “Unable to establish an SSL connection with vCenter Server”

Initially, I could get away with just ignoring it and if I tried it again, it would sometimes work, however for some reason, it would now always fail.

I did some digging and the logs suggested something to do with the Certificates not matching. As my MAC is not domain joined, I started digging around in the Keychain Access tool –> Applications –> Utilities –> Keychain Access

In here I found all sorts of historical certificates from my various lab environments that I’ve added over the months and thought I’d better clear up some legacy certs as well as duplicate named certificates as a start point. It was here that I found that I had two certs for the same domain object (one which I’d previously rebuilt) so figured that was a good start to remove at least the now no longer used duplicate.

The problem still existed so I did some further investigation as whilst I had a trusted certificate for my VCSA, I couldn’t see the Trusted Root CA. This isn’t visible by default so I had to add the X509Anchors keychain by clicking “File –> Add Keychain” and locate this within /System/Library/Keychains/X509Anchors

Once this was visible, I again could see a previously trusted Root CA from a legacy domain I no longer use at home, but not the Root CA of my Microsoft Domain. I removed the invalid entry and went across to my internal Microsoft CA website to get the Root CA to reimport.

http://domain.name/certsrv

I downloaded the Root CA by clicking on install this CA certificate and it downloaded it to my MAC.

I then attempted to double click the file to import it and when prompted selected X509Anchors however I then received: Error 100013.

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Following on from a Sponsored visit at LonVMUG, I decided to take a closer look at Bitdefenders GravityZone product as it sparked an interest I have in trying to locate the most optimal and performant AV solution in a virtualized environment whilst at the same time offering relative deployment simplicity. I’ve previously deployed Trend Deep Security (agentless) and whilst the product itself performs well when compared with a full fat agent deployment in a virtualized environment, I did find displeasure in having to perform a whole sequence of prerequisite changes in order to upgrade a core component of a previous client infrastructure (Trend Deep Security 9.5 didn’t work with vSphere 6 so a core Virtualisation upgrade resulted in a spawned off project to upgrade to Trend 9.6) . As you may or may not know, agentless AV deployments aren’t really fully agentless when they place a dependency on the vShield Endpoint driver that is installed inside the virtual machine. In effect this could be classified as an installation requirement and therefore an agent of sort as it is not installed into virtual machines via VMware tools by default.

With BitDefenders GravityZones, they offer a light agent deployment that to me sits somewhere between a full fat agent and a typical agentless deployment. The great news is that it takes away the dependency and complexity that vShield introduces to environments that just want to keep things simple. At the end of the day, AV needs to be easy to deploy, guaranteed to work and effective at doing its job.

I’ve successfully deployed Bitdefender into my homelab and will have a deeper look at how its feature set compares with competitor products.

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Many years ago, I used to demo the capabilities of VMware by using the freely accessible Nostalgia OVF from the VMware marketplace (I think it was available through vCenter 2.5 at the time). It was such a small and lightweight appliance containing a simple set of well known games that made demonstrating the power of a relatively new production ready technology (it was 2006) all the easier. I remember sitting in various meetings with clients and decision makers talking about and showing vMotion, Fault Tolerance and HA whilst playing Prince of Persia. I also remember using CPU Hog to enforce DRS activity as the icing on the cake to combine vMotion and intelligent resource placement. It was such as a simple but effective way of getting the message across about the capabilities of what could be done and how VMware was to be a game changer in server deployment, cost reduction and resource optimization.

Earlier this week, I had a Nostalgic moment, wondering if I can still do the same thing today that I did all those years ago – re-performing some new tests but leveraging a number of other product features available in the VMware portfolio (SRM, vSAN stretched cluster etc).

I set out to find the Nostalgia OVF but despite a search through the Virtual Appliance Marketplace (via Solution Exchange) I didn’t have any luck .

I then stumbled across an old VMware community post here that sent me in the right direction of the OVF

http://download3.vmware.com/software/appliances/Nostalgia.ovf

After running through the typical OVF deployment process and entering the above URL, the VM appeared within vSphere 6, residing on my vSAN datastore and waiting to be powered on. The results can be seen below:-

Not quite sure when my next post will be, lets see how long it takes me to relive some of my childhood gaming memories ;o)

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Just a quick note of caution for any other home lab users who are considering using vSAN 6.1. As part of the prep work for building the environment, it is important that if using consumer grade disks and/or bypassing some of the other HCL requirements, if there are sustained periods of high latency (which can be expected depending on how hard you push your kit), you should disable the device monitoring and unmounting process which could otherwise take your disk group offline. Whilst initially I thought this was the silver bullet to the problems I’ve been experiencing, in my scenario, it’s only been the Consumer grade SSD that disappears, not the entire Disk Group containing both the Samsung (consumer) and Intel (Enterprise) SSD.

I’ve copied the key commands below directly from Cormacs blog but I have applied *BOTH* settings in my environment.

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Further to my previous post regarding rebuilding my home lab with the Intel SSDs as the caching tier for an all flash vsan, unfortunately within a day, one of the ESX hosts fell over with the usual Permanent Disk Loss error and I had a sad face. I rebooted the host and re-applied the storage policy to bring the hosts back into compliance and thought I’d give everything one last chance before reverting to the magnetic disks. Since then (3 days and counting), the environment has stayed up and online and in fact I have pushed it harder than ever before by running multiple clones (at least 3 at a time) to properly kick the tyres at risk of building lots of VMs only for me to have to svMotion them over to my external array which is time consuming.

On average, a 40GB Windows 2012 Virtual Machine is taking no more than 7 minutes to clone and at the time, as I’ve only got Gb connectivity between hosts as part of the vSan cluster, the network is actually the bottleneck here at 125MB/s (and that would be assuming it was flat out and there was not overhead/transmit issues)

I’ve been particularly light on the customisation side, but have green lights where green lights need to exist on the solutions I’ve built thus far. The most time consuming piece was the Certification piece, involving the replacement of the machine cert on the VCSA alongside working out how to reissue the Certs for the view connection and composer servers after I’d already performed the installs. From experience I’ve always had fun with certificates in Horizon View deployments, but this time round wasn’t as painful as I knew most of the pitfalls and gotchas. For those that administer Horizon View, this is a joy to see post installation:-

I used some of the following blogposts/links as reference for redeploying certificates:-

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What an experience and a warm welcome I received during my first VMUG. The day kicked off with an entertaining start and a jam packed agenda with a great list of sponsors and valuable content. As a newbie, I was asked to introduce myself and as a consequence was rewarded for doing not a lot more than saying my name and was given a copy of Mastering vSphere 6, which is quite apt given my recent certification achievement for VCP6.

As I glanced around a very popular event, I felt somewhat star struck to come face to face with some industry experts, most notably Mike Laverick from whom I owe a lot of my career success to as a result of being a regular follower of his own passion for blogging in the early days of his rftm-ed blog.

There were also three VCDX’s in the room, again something I aspire to achieve over the next couple of years work/life dependent of course!

Plenty of swag was also there to be had, including hip flasks, Captain vSan t-shirts, USB keys, portable chargers and the token notebooks and pens. These came courtesy of sponsors such as Tegile, Bitdefender and Velostrata.

I’ll try and include some of the content topics in subsequent blog posts very soon.

Today I was in the process of managing my VMs and as I use a Mac with the VMware Remote Console, it can sometimes be a little flakey in terms of stability. This isn’t normally a big deal for me as typically I’ll reopen the MKS session and pick up from where I left off. For some reason, today was a little different and after the usual “crash”, I attempted to connect back across and was presented with “Unable to connect to the MKS: Console access to the virtual machine cannot be granted since the connection limit of 1 has been reached”.

I then tried the integrated console but received a similar message of “You have reached the maximum number of connected consoles: 1. Please contact your administrator.”

I knew that restarting the VM would clear the issue, or powering it down to increase the number connections permitted (KB2015407) would be a work around but the problem was I didn’t know what state the VM was in as I was mid installation so couldn’t really justify pulling the plug.

At that point I thought I’d try a quick vMotion between the hosts and as if by magic, my subsequent attempt to connect to the console in either way sprung back into life!